film42

Very very impressive.

It's not Adobe Dreamweaver with a chatbot plus a DAG-style job GUI, it's an agentic IDE ecosystem for $3B. But seriously, what am I missing here?

Zoom CEO: Hi, we'd like an SLA credit for the global outage you caused our company.

GoDaddy: I am so sorry about that. I can offer you a one-time coupon for $10 off your next purchase or renewal. Would you like me to apply this to your account?

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Most companies just hope an apologetic zoom call is enough to retain your business, and most of the time it works. Not enough has been written about the asymmetry of your SLA credits to your revenue impact for a given vendor outage and how that should guide your build vs buy decision framework.

Everyone wants to go the agent route until the agent messes up once after working 99 times in a row. "Why did it make a silly mistake?" We don't know. "Well, let's put a few more guard rails around it." Sounds good... back to "workflows."

Glad to see you found some footing! I just saw the email about PgML today.

You should mention the timeline of projects leading up to PgDog in your marketing. I was looking for references to pgcat (very briefly) but didn’t see any. Your background will bring a lot of peace of mind to technology adopters in big enterprise.

Having written several pg txn poolers, I like the implementation. I also love your simple branding and I think this could make a fantastic product for enterprise customers. However, my biggest concern as a buyer is longevity. PgCat (another popular pooler in rust) will likely lose funding shortly. Meanwhile, PgBouncer is battle tested, small in scope, and is starting to get consistent new contribution.

Fantastic work, team!

Yeah there are some interesting similarities. However, the biggest difference is Google has the right to keep source proprietary, and companies like Unity are allowed to provide source code with a reference only license (still proprietary), but the US has FOIA to help push information into the open. Does a DB schema fall under FOIA scope? I think a better question is, can (or is) a db schema being used to conceal information? Is the law attempting to reinforce this barrier?

In other words, it should not be about the intent of the requester, but the intent of its owner; and in the case of that article, either by bias in narrative, or the fact that it rhymes with events of the past, there is some tomfoolery about.

No, but having the names to the fields, directly from Google, is very helpful for further understanding what's available from within the sandbox.

Forming the union is step one of a long road before you actually reap the benefits. It can take year(s) to negotiate the CBA with your employer. Sounds like fear of layoffs was a huge factor, but the employer must agree to those terms, and that remains to be seen. So for now that's all rhetoric. Show me a team that has gotten to the other side with these terms in a contract.

Great. Show me examples of teams who took that bet and how it paid off.

I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."

What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.

I have family and friends who work for airline unions, parcel unions, teacher unions, etc. Some love it, some hate it. Those who love it had a broken fan in the van all summer with no air conditioning until the union stepped in. How would a union meaningfully improve that situation at a tech office with paid lunches and decent benefits?

Like, the promise of a better tomorrow from unions carries the same tone as a promise to IPO "really soon" from the CEO/CFO tag team at the annual kick-off meeting. What does it look like when rubber meets the road?

Wow! I was looking at Fauna for a new project just yesterday. The tech looks good but a custom query language put me off pretty fast. Is this a real language or just an ORM syntax? Can I push code into the DB, or is it like the HCL of SQL?

Even so, I hope it takes on a new life as an open source project and finds success. Looking forward to reading the code.

> It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.

Unless I'm crazy, I think I've used my Meta Ray-Bans to do all of these things at some point. So is this a watch only limitation that Meta was able to avoid?

iOS wearable integrations are bad, but somehow Meta Ray-Bans are very good. Voice assist to start a call, send a text, read a notification, etc. Did Meta get special access to do this?

It's smart defense, great offense, and a good product behind it. Each eat a big chunk of that $100B target. I don't see Wiz as a 10 year company, I see it as a forever requirement for companies to manage all of their cloud resources (across all providers). It will be here as long as GCP/AWS are here. I expect a short path to ROI on this one.

Wiz by itself is a great business and public markets will price it accordingly, but Google is able to price it much higher because of its unique position. Wiz + GCP sales team will boost adoption of the main product, a Google branded security tool keeps eyes from looking out, and of course, the ability to move huge amounts of revenue from competitors over to GCP is something only a hyper-scaler can tap. At 36x+ valuation, this is still a great deal for Google.

I'm surprised this acquisition didn't happen sooner. The first time I used Wiz I knew a big cloud provider would be snatching them up at some point. Why? Because every enterprise that decides to use cloud providers then needs to find someone to keep that cloud environment safe.

But also, and may more important, you get to see everyones cloud usage, across all providers, with a high level of permissions. Said differently, Google can now target customers with massive spend across other cloud providers and work to migrate them to GCP, at a price that's just cheap enough to over come the switching cost.

It's still around but not in active development. Tiling window managers like i3 are just a window manager, but you can add compiz as your compositor to wobble if you want. I think compton is still the most popular "just good enough" compositor used by i3 users (it's what I use). Sway is both a compositor and a window manager.

IMO the architect-leader role is an attempt at scratching the itch of not being able to code. I've worked with leaders that would spend any extra time they had building projects in new frontier tech to understand the nuances behind the marketing, and I'm sure we've all worked with folks that blindly parrot the marketing speak in design meetings.

You don't have to always be building things to be a great leader, but I place more trust in a company with a technical CTO.

My startup has to maintain a HIPAA cert, hence PHI scanning. But, you are correct.

I read all the time about folks who become a VP/CTO and stop coding. Management skills are not coding skills. I know it. But I can't for the life of me figure out why folks hang up their keyboards and let their first super power go to waste. You can be a technical CTO from start to finish. Treat your team and the company like a service that needs active contribution, maintenance, and on-call support; and also, get your hands dirty building by yourself and with your team.

Using something like Vanta or Drata makes life a lot easier. I've done SOC2/PCI audits in fintech where we change tools every year (meaning we reinvented the wheel every year), and I've now done it at my own startup using Drata. Auditors feel more comfortable, you'll feel more comfortable, etc. Even if you're not planning on doing it right away, just sign up and have it start tracking your progress.

It's time consuming, but not all consuming. I think I spend <2 hours a week on compliance now that we're set up.

The "fun" part was engineering ways to implement things like PHI scanning and WAF protection as cheaply as possible. There's almost always a nearly-free cron job/python script/slackbot alternative to every "mandatory" 5-6 figure SaaS subscription in the space.

I think this will be a hit with the big name audit companies. I know some use databricks for pyspark on the M&A side. As deals move forward and they get more data, they have to scale up their instances which isn't cheap. If polars enables serverless compute where you pay by the job, that could be a big win.

And sure, databricks has an idle shutdown feature, but suppose it takes ~6 hours to process the deal report, and only the first hour needs the scaled up power to compute one table, and the rest of the jobs only need 1/10th the mem and cores. Polars could save these firms a lot of money.

Nomad is way easier to self-manage than K8s, but GCP does that for me, with all the compliance boxes checked, for extremely cheap. Every cloud provider is in that boat. Nomad will be more work and more money, be it compute or enterprise fees. I'm sticking with k8s.

I think it's a classic expectations problem. OpenAI is neither _open_ nor is it releasing an _AGI_ model in the near future. But when you see a new major model drop, you can't help but ask, "how close is this to the promise of AGI they say is just around the corner?" Not even close. Meanwhile Anthropic is keeping their heads down, not playing the hype game, and letting the model speak for itself.

Late reply... I don't have my notes anymore on kafka client evals in ruby. When evaluating it was for a former employer. Karafka is very impressive though. Well done on the library.

First time I've heard of KIP-932 and it looks very good. The two biggest issues IMO are finding a good Kafka client in the language you need (even for ruby this is a challenge) and easy at-least-once workers.

You can over partition and make at-least-once workers happen (if you have a good Kafka client), or you use an http gateway and give up safe at-least-once. Hopefully this will make it easier to build an at-least-once style gateway that's easier to work with across a variety of languages. I know many have tried in the past but not dropping messages is hard to do right.

It was, but I spend a lot of time flying near DC, so it was nice to know exactly where airspace boundaries were. A luxury, for sure.

The C172 with a G1000 setup was around $20/hr more at the local flight school than a C172 with a six pack. Def not needed for X-country but I always felt safer flying it through busy airspace. Garmin really does make fantastic avionics.